The Order of the Scales Deas - The Order of the Scales

He saw dragons racing away too: terrified riders desperate to live. Saw others give vengeful chase. In that moment, he understood. Principles was a lie. There was no strategy here, no tactic to outwit the enemy, not in this sprawling shapeless horror. There was terror, that was all. It was who broke first, nothing more, nothing less. Whose riders fled in fear and whose gave themselves up to the dragon-fury, which was every bit as terrible.

For a moment he watched appalled, for the few seconds he had to think before there was a war-dragon attacking from below. Wraithwing was already turning; Jehal could feel his desire to fight. Enough running and ducking. Enough of scorpions. Tooth and claw. The southern way. He could feel the other dragons around him answering, returning Wraithwing’s challenge with glee.

The war-dragon almost caught him. Wraithwing let it, then slashed the air with his tail, slapped the other dragon on the nose and turned in the way that only Wraithwing could turn, flipping in the air. The dragons doused each other with fire while Jehal pressed himself flat, visor down, shielding his damaged hand from the flames and hoping not to die. Wraithwing shuddered. Tooth and claw and tail tore and lashed at the riders on the war-dragon’s back, and then they were apart and he was still alive. Safe.

Safe until he felt a sudden sharp tug on the saddle and Wraithwing’s scales started to slide under his hands.

No! He flipped up the visor. He was strapped to his saddle, but the whole harness was moving. No! No! No! His fingers fumbled with the straps. A dragon saddle and harness weighed as much as a man. And then what? Ride bareback? I hate to tell you, but that only works with horses. He almost shouted at Wraithwing to dive for the ground but bit his tongue. The dragon would do exactly that, and then what? It didn’t make much difference whether you fell off the back of a dragon from half a mile up or from fifty feet about the ground, the mess was still about the same.

He cast a quick glance behind. The war-dragon was still there. Lots of ropes and bits of harness trailed behind it, but it hadn’t gone for the ground. Someone was still alive to tell it what to do. Any moment now that someone would come back for another go.

Vishmir’s cock! The saddle slipped again. Wraithwing was flying in a straight line now, with long careful wingbeats, his body slightly twisted as though trying to help Jehal stay balanced. Which would have been all very well if they had lots of open space around and could glide very gently to the ground. Less helpful in the middle of a fight. Might as well have painted ‘Eat me’ on his back.

A shower of stray scorpion bolts fell from the battle above. One punched a hole through Wraithwing’s wing. The dragon didn’t flinch.

I’m going to fall.

Now half a dragon-rider fell past him. A few seconds later a war-dragon followed, one without a painted belly, Jehal saw. Stupid thing, waste of effort, noticing that. Don’t have time, don’t have time! The saddle shifted again. Started to slide.

Saddle straps were gone. Still no one was diving to finish him. All he had to do was pull himself forward out of the saddle slowly and carefully, wrap his arms around Wraithwing somehow and fall out of the sky a little way so everyone thought he was dead. And then, just maybe, if he was really, really lucky, slowly glide to ground and make a nice gentle landing without shattering every bone in his body.

Right. And then Hyrkallan will land beside you and personally bend his knee and call you speaker. Because that’s just as likely.

Wraithwing veered sharply. For a moment the sun turned off and everything went dark. Jehal squawked in panic as he and the saddle fell away, and then something enormous went straight over him, a vast black shape. Talons as long as a man’s leg snatched at the space where he’d been, tore a furrow in Wraithwing’s back, ripping scales and the muscle beneath, and pulled away what little of Jehal’s harness remained. Then the black dragon had passed, the sun came out again and Jehal was left hanging in the air. Alive and perfectly unharmed and with a sudden and dire shortage of wings.

And then he fell.

Cities. She could smell them from a hundred miles away, except it wasn’t a scent that taunted her but thoughts. Human thoughts. Thousands upon thousands of them, faint and distant and intertwined, a filthy mass of gibberish.

Cities. They stank. They intrude.

Other little thoughts popped up, scattered around her. Bright pinpricks of sentience. Humans lived everywhere. Even here in the barren deserts, they eked out an existence in tiny knots and clusters. Wherever there was water there were more of them. Water was one of the few things a dragon needed. Water to stay cool. Out here in the desert they might sleep at the bottom of a river or a lake to keep out of the midday heat.

Everything breathes. It was an uneasy topic among the dragons. Everything breathed. Everything except dragons.

When she thought about that the other dragons tried not to listen. But everything breathes. She could feel them, distancing their thoughts from her, but they could never hide them, not completely. Just as she couldn’t hide hers as she remembered the alchemists and the naked men with painted skins and poison in their blood who killed dragons as they gave their lives away.

She spread her wings over the landscape. A wide riverbed snaked through little hills of jumbled earth, dead and dry except for tufts of thorny grass. A trickle of water glistening. This was a land of snakes and spiders. Dragons didn’t belong here. Here was too hot. She missed the mountains and their snowy crags and their glaciers and their freezing lakes. The city drew them on, though. The stink of it. The cacophony of thoughts, reaching out across the miles, a constant thorn in the mind.

They found it a day and a night of flight from the smoking ruin of Outwatch. The home of the last little one who had called himself king of all the realms. She didn’t know the name of it. She’d never asked. It was an ugly place. Glaring white stone, low squat buildings, sat beside a huge flat lake of shallow tepid water. Beyond, salt flats stretched out to throttle the horizon, blinding in the sun. There were towers, but not very many. Walls, but little and low. No army would ever march out here, or if it did, would die of thirst and heat before it could arrive. That was this city’s defence. Against men it might have been perfect. Against dragons, it was useless.

They started with the eyrie. When they were done, they burned the lake dry and then flew a hundred miles along the sluggish river that fed it and made it flow another way. Heat and thirst.

When they were done with that, they flew back. They hunted and they feasted. As night fell they stretched out to cool and to doze. Sated and surrounded by ash.

In the morning that followed, when the city that happened to be called Bloodsalt was nothing but blackened stone and scorched earth, when the dragons had all eaten their fill and there was nothing left alive for a hundred miles save the few little ones who’d managed to hide in the deepest of the caverns, they heard a cry. As one, the dragons stopped, paused from their feast as a thousand voices raged in fury among the spirits of the dead.

The Spear of the Earth. The horror that had almost destroyed the world, awake again. Snow reached out for it, sought it. She caught a second dragon’s thoughts, a fleeting glimpse of what he saw before the spear snuffed him out.

A glimpse, but a glimpse was enough.

Kemir!

Jehal fell twenty feet and then stopped with a wrenching shock of pain. He screamed and whimpered and then swung around, helpless as a puppet, thumping into Wraithwing’s belly. He bounced off again, dangling, still attached to the dragon by the last rope, the legbreaker, the one that was supposed to save your life when exactly this happened, but rarely did.